


In the beginning is my end, in the end is my beginning

by notacute



Category: Looper (2012)
Genre: Character Death, Child Death, Gen, Implied Character Death, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 17:09:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notacute/pseuds/notacute
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A man kills for his wife, a mother dies for her son, and a man learns how to love someone other than himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the beginning is my end, in the end is my beginning

**Author's Note:**

  * For [airspaniel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/airspaniel/gifts).



_Then I saw it. I saw a mom who would die for her son. A man who would kill for his wife. A boy angry and alone. Laid out in front of him, the bad path, I saw it. And path was a circle, around and around. So I changed it._

 

 

_A mom who would die for her son._

 

 

**THE RAINMAKER**

An endless wall of sugarcane splits the field, a massive seawall in a storm. A pair of tiny legs run, bolt, split the sea with tiny hands, even as the gunshot from the gat rings out behind him. His tiny shoes kick up dirt, small hands push their way through as he keeps going, just as fast as he can. Just like Sara said.

Just like his mom had said.

“You get back here!” the Bad Man yells at his back, but he doesn’t turn around. He doesn’t stop. He’s not going to get scared again. Even as the sound of a gun thunders out behind him, louder than before. 

The whole world silences, and there’s only the sound of his feet and cane, his own breath and the sob he keeps trying to hold back. He’s going to be brave. He has to be brave.

Cid’s shoelaces loosen and flap behind him, he steps on them, trips and falls. He doesn’t see the rock, this giant rock that Sara had cussed at for years because she could never budge it, not even with a plow. 

When he wakes up, it’s getting dark and he knows it’s past supper time. 

Someone’s calling his name, and for a second, he panics, because it sounds like the Bad Man found him. The voice changes and shifts, and his eyes focus as Joe helps him to his feet, dusting him off, checking the place on his cheek where the Bad Man shot him.

“Hey. You okay?” Joe asks, and even though he’s little, Cid can tell that Joe sounds scared, “The bad guy’s gone now.”

“Where’s my mom?” is all he can think of, and it’s not so easy to be brave anymore, even though he wants to. 

“She... your mom, she had to go away.”

“You’re lying.” 

“Yeah. I’m lying.” 

Cid hugs Joe’s leg and he cries. He cries and the ground shakes a little and the cane sways some, but he stops it from happening this time. He couldn’t keep his mom from getting killed but he stops it just this one time.

It doesn’t feel like life should go on, but it does. Joe says they can’t go back to the farm house because it’s gone, and even though Cid knows he’s not telling the truth, he doesn’t say anything. They drive a crappy, beat up, white car into the city, the back of it impossibly filled up with bars of silver. Cid eats a can of beans in a messy apartment while Joe says he’s just going to check things out.

When he comes back, he tells Cid that no one’s going to come looking for him anymore. All the bad men are gone now.

Even so, they don’t stay there for very long. It’s only a day or two before the two of them are on a boat to France, the silver traded for currency, Cid’s jaw haphazardly bandaged in a way that he knows isn’t quite right.

His mom would have done a better job.

 

Time passes.

 

Three years, and Cid gets expelled from school. A kid says something about his synthetic jaw—it never really healed up right, and he still talks a little funny— and Cid hits him to keep bad things from happening. 

But the end of it doesn’t come so simple. He and Joe have an argument. They scream at each other and the windows shake and lightbulbs burst. 

There’s a wild fire burning inside of Cid, a rage he can’t seem to get rid of, and neither of them know how to extinguish it.

Joe doesn’t know he sees, but one night, Cid catches him cleaning his blunderbuss. He’s sitting in the dark and drinking something brown and strong and his forehead is creased as he frowns hard and mutters to himself. It’s the first time he’s so much as pulled the gun out since they left the farm, and Cid’s taller than it is, now.

 

Six years and Cid’s taking apart lamps and building things. He’s teaching Joe stuff now. He’s levitating quarters. Chairs. Mini Coopers. Joe tells Cid that he’s supposed to be learning to control it so that bad stuff doesn’t happen, but that just makes Cid wonder if all of that goes together no matter what. He couldn’t stop his mom from getting killed, so maybe someone exploding in a flower of blood is supposed to happen too. Maybe this is why he’s TK like nobody else is.

 

Ten years and Cid can tell the money’s starting to run thin. He offers to go and steal them some more so there’s no way they’ll ever have to live on the street. He remembers, a long time ago, Joe telling him how his own mom had to sell him to get by, and he doesn’t want that. By now, there’s no way any vault could keep him out and he knows it. They scream at each other, but by now, Cid has learned to control it. He’s fifteen and he could get rid of Joe if he wanted to, just like that. He can do so much more than he could when he was little. Instead, he packs a bag and heads for the door, threatening to get on a train and go.

Joe’s not his dad, and he doesn’t know why he’s stayed as long as he has.

“You get back here!” Joe shouts at his back, and when Cid turns around, he’s five years old all over again.

The windows explode in a shower of glass, the furniture splinters, and when Joe comes to, Cid is already gone.

It takes Cid a boat and several trains to make it back to Kansas, and by now, the old farmhouse is falling apart. No one’s touched it. The wood floor in the sitting room is black and long since bled through, all the bits of the man with the gun long rotted away. 

Tired, dirty and practically starving, he sleeps on the mattress of his old bed, curled up to keep his feet from hanging over the edge. At some point, vagrants must have broken in and taken the blanket and pillows, but it’s the most comfortable bed he’s had in weeks.

He wakes when the harsh early morning sun catches his face from the window, and sees the mound of earth just outside: an unmarked grave grown over with grass and cane gone wild.

Cid always wondered what Joe did with his mom, but he could never get a straight answer out of him. 

“I knew you’d end up here,” comes the voice at his back, and Cid doesn’t turn to look at Joe, at the face he should have recognized a long time ago. With his back to him, it’s easier to remember that morning in the fields and why this mound is here in the first place.

Joe’s always been a liar.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me?” Cid asks, though he knows it’s a stupid question. Already he’s angry. That same rage that he couldn’t control when he was little is burning him up from the inside and he doesn’t even want to extinguish it anymore.

Joe shuffles his feet—his steps sound somehow heavy— and takes a long moment before answering. 

“Your mom… she wanted you brought up right. Thought that maybe things— she thought you could be good. You _are_ good, kid,” Joe says, and Cid knows he’s scared. These days, he can always tell when people are scared of him. 

Cid’s five years old again.

Joe doesn’t know how the hell he ended up here.

“Look, I’m sorry she died, but it wasn’t me who did it,” Joe goes on to say, “I could sit here all day trying to explain to you how it works, but you know it wasn’t me. You wanna kill me though… and turn into what your mom said you didn’t have to be, then I guess there’s not a whole lot I can do to stop you.”

When Cid turns around to look at Joe, finally, he’s surprised at how Joe’s expression changes. Cid’s dirty, he knows, hair matted to one side of his face, expression snarled into a harsh frown. He’s got nothing to his name but the rage and the anger, that resentment that he’s carried inside him before he even knew exactly what it was.

Cid’s eyes land on the blunderbuss in Joe’s hand, the one he hasn’t seen since the light bulbs burst.

“You wanna kill me, just go ahead and do it. But I know that's not you.” 

Joe reaches out.

He puts the gun in Cid’s hand.

Joe doesn’t even get two paces in before he’s blown away, and Cid doesn’t even need the gun.

 

 

_A man who would kill for his wife._

 

 

 

**OLD MEN SPEAKING FRENCH**

He’s not supposed to be here anymore.

He’s not supposed to be here.

Sonofabitch, he’s supposed to disappear or turn into his younger self, that dumbfuck child. Instead, the kid’s dead, his mom’s dead, and Joe’s standing on the edge of a field of sugar cane with a smoking gun in his hand, wondering where the hell he went wrong. 

Something was supposed to happen, but he can’t remember what. That fucking fog in his brain is back, and so much about his past is a muddled mess. 

_Her._

He was doing it for her.

Only Joe can’t remember her face or her name, and he fumbles with his gun, dropping it in the dirt as he digs for his pocket watch and flips it open. There inside of the watch is dull and unpolished, and he can’t remember what was supposed to be there. There’s an ache somewhere deep in his heart and he doesn’t fucking know _why._

He’s pissed off at himself the second the sob forms in his throat, and he cries out, a noise almost inhuman, something horrible and fucking hopeless. It was supposed to work. It was supposed to set everything straight, only now he doesn’t know which memories are the right ones and what he’s supposed to be protecting and what he’s supposed to be destroying. It’s all such a goddamn mess.

Across the field, that kid is crouched over the bodies, doubled over in a silent sob that doesn’t make its far enough for Joe to hear.

What a pussy, he thinks, even as he’s trying to pull himself together. How many jobs has he done, this kid, and this one thing gets to him like this?

Except now, those memories are pretty fucking clear to him: the porch and the water, the night in the barn, the little toy frog and the trap door. He remembers more about those few days in the farmhouse than the smooth inside of his pocket watch.

Joe looks up, not even realizing that at some point he’d dropped to his knees in the dirt. He turns his sadness into anger, picks up his gun and stands. Maybe there’s nobody coming to look for the kid anymore, but who the hell knows what’s running through his head? Maybe Joe’s got an advantage anyone else wouldn’t have, but he still doesn’t know what’s coming until after it comes. And even if he doesn’t care about what happens now, whether or not the universe implodes in on itself with the two of them here at the same time now without no way to fix it that he knows of, but that might not be the way his younger self thinks.

“The gat men are dinosaurs,” Joe calls, “Use your fucking head, kid. It’s done.”

But his words seem to fall on deaf ears as Joe watches himself, the kid with the backwards face, trudge across the field, fumbling with his blunderbuss. He’s twenty, nineteen, eighteen steps away before Joe decides he’s tired of waiting for the shot that’ll probably miss him altogether and whips the gat at him so it spins end over and and catches him right between the eyes. It looks like it smarts, but at least he’s sure it won’t leave a mark.

He doesn’t remember ever being that stupid. Jesus.

Joe leaves himself lying there, tucks the gat in the waistband of his pants and walks. He’s never actually been to the farmhouse before, but he remembers the way there. He remembers why the windows are blown out, and why Jesse’s in more than one piece on the floor and on the ceiling and splattered on the walls. He’d never seen anything like that before in his life, never thought that TK was anything more than a shitty party trick, something losers did to try and look like super stars.

Something about what Cid did fucked up the power, so he has to go down to the basement to flip the breakers when it starts to get dark out.

Another version of himself is waiting for him at the top of the stairs when he comes back up, angry and sad, that blunderbuss the only thing he’s got left in the world.

They stare at each other for a long time before either of them speaks.

“You loved her,” Joe says, a statement, not a question. Those memories aren’t the cloudy ones, even though there’s more cloud than not now.

“No,” the kid says.

“Him, though. You loved him. Cid. Even after you figured out what he was.”

“I didn’t even _know_ him,” is the gruff reply Joe gets, and it’s all he can do to not laugh in his own face.

“What the hell do you even know about it? You’re just a kid. A dumb fucking kid. Of course you knew him. You knew him as well as you knew me. God…” he trails off and sinks down to sit on the couch. It still smells like blood, strong and coppery, and only one of the arms is even intact anymore. Joe remembers hiding behind it, even if it feels like he was never there.

Cid stood at the top of the stairs, such a fucking smartass little kid. The memory, clear as fucking day, almost makes him smile. Joe can almost separate that from all the shit that came just after it.

Maybe he could have been good. Could have grown up right.

“Vous allez retourner à le sauver. C'est pourquoi je suis encore ici,” he mutters.

“What?” 

“Your French is still shit.” Joe laughs bitterly, and he pulls the gat out of his pocket and studies it.

One more time around, and maybe he can fix things. 

A gat’s not quite as loud as a blunderbuss, not really. Then again, he’s never exactly been shot with one before.

 

So _this_ is what it feels like.

 

_That path was a circle, around and around. So I changed it._

 

 

 

**AN UNMARKED GRAVE**

The next morning, everything looks a little brighter.

The nick on Cid’s cheek, it’s gonna heal just fine, but he complains pretty much all morning about how it still stings when he tries to drink orange juice. 

“How about you just have some water instead, baby?” Sara says while she clears away their plates, leftover scraps of cheesy eggs still still left on Cid’s from where he said they tasted funny to him. But he’s stubborn, he drinks it anyway just because she’s already poured it, and Sara can already tell he’s trying to be extra good.

Those days used to be few and far between, and now it’s more often than not.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t bad times. They come, just like always. Sara keeps the giant safe in her closet, because there are still times she has to crawl into it, curled into a ball while she waits for it all to pass, waits for the farmhouse to stop shaking and for Cid to calm down again.

He’s so small and there’s something so giant inside him, it’s no wonder he doesn’t know what to do with it. Nobody would know what to do with it. Hell, all she ever did was hold down guys’ quarters in bars and sometimes she wondered why she had to be TK. It was fucking weird.

She’d never call Cid that, though. Maybe Joe thought she should be terrified of him, that he’s destined to become some horrible thing in the future, some man who murders and conquers, but she can’t believe that. If she ever lets herself think that way, then Sara loses everything. She loses her perfect little baby who tries so damn hard now. She loses her son, who finally calls her 'mom', and finally forgives her for being so fucking selfish when he was born.

It doesn’t take Cid long to figure out why there’s a fresh mound of dirt just on the edge of the cane field, not quite visible from any of the house windows. She dug it up herself, the first time she ever used her shovel to bury a person, even if she’d claimed to have put more than a few vagrants six feet under.

“That’s Joe out in the yard, isn’t it?” he asks her, one night at dinner.

“Baby, why don’t you eat your peas, okay?” Sara replies, not wanting to broach the subject. The whole thing’s too fucked up to even start in on, and even now, knowing in her heart that neither of them don’t have anything to worry about anymore, she still wants to keep him from all of that. She still needs to keep him safe.

“I know that he saved us,” Cid says in that way that reminds her just how brilliant he really is. She pauses and takes a breath, closes her eyes.

“He did,” she admits, “I guess he was a good man after all.”

“I told you. I knew he’d protect us,” he says, and goes back to eating his dinner, just like she asked.

The next morning, she walks out to the mound, and brings that pocket watch that she took off of him, the one from that day, and lays it down on the grave, marks it. It won’t matter to anybody except her and Cid, but this way neither of them will forget how a stranger put his faith in both of them. How somebody believed she could raise him right and make sure this giant thing inside of him could help instead of hurt, could build instead of destroy.

Because he does.

He grows up good, just like she said he would.


End file.
